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I have worked in office one many IT gigs my whole career, 20+ years. I am now moving from Tampa to Honolulu and my current company wants me to continue to work for them remotely. We plan to hire someone for emergency issues and other physical activities at the office, but I find myself concerned and looking for the best ways to continue to do my job as well as when I am physically here. Any suggestions, advice, systems or software I should put in place before I move in a month and half?

-Jake

@GoTo

79 Spice ups
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Invest in Teamviewer. Awesome you are moving to Hawaii and get to remote to Tampa. I’m envious.

59 Spice ups
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What kind of firewall/router do they have? Perhaps setup a VPN if the equipment allows. And yeah, as Denis says, you suck.

30 Spice ups
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I would also suggest, if you don’t have one already, a remote desktop server hosted in your datacenter that you can remote into to do your work. Also, virtualize your systems as much as possible if you haven’t already. It generally reduces the need for “hands on” work.

8 Spice ups
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chrome remote desktop is what i usually use, can use a PC in the office and you’re all set. Its free and works well.

1 Spice up
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I loved working from home the two days a week when I was doing it. I would VPN in and used LogMeIn for remote control. You may want to try Remote Utilities instead of LogMeIn.

5 Spice ups
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Oh man, this is where having VMware Horizon View makes life so much easier…

10 Spice ups
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BTW, say hello to my birth-city! :smiley:

1 Spice up
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At 8am in Tampa, it’s 2am in Honolulu. :frowning:

26 Spice ups
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We have a few remote workers…I work from home when the weathers bad but I don’t like it I like going to the office…yeah I agree with Teamviewer

1 Spice up
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If there is anybody with you, be sure and have a closable door, and understanding of the rule Do Not Disturb.

2 Spice ups
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Wow thanks for all the great advice, I made sure the boss understood the time difference before we agreed to any of this, I dont mind waking up before 6am (noon EST) to keep what I have now going into the future. As for a dedicated office the girlfriend brought up the need for it so that should go over fine. I have a Cisco ISR as the primary router and planed to vpn in and will get teamviewer setup everywhere. We are moving to a new ERP/CRM (Deltek) for our main line of business and two others are being put on cloud hosted software. For the most part where all the day to day work is done should be pretty solid. I was just looking today into virtualizing our Elastix PBX but it was being cranky with Hyper-V. If there are more suggestions of I open to hear them. If things work out well I’ll see about setting up a Spicworks vacation house for you all when I can :slight_smile:

-Jake

13 Spice ups
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I suggest at least 2 different technologies for remote access (VPN with RDP and Logmein/Teamviewer whatever) in case one won’t connect. Take photos of physical hardware/routers etc… so you can navigate the onsite tech using those and you can tell them exactly that “yes you need to check the LEDs on that black Cisco box above the patch panel”
I personally don’t like working from home. I couldn’t concentrate 100% (Turn on TV etc…) and I am too social to not to interact with people.

16 Spice ups
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Use litemanager remote access to work from home

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We currently use this and all I have to say is “I’m sorry”

3 Spice ups
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Denis so far I like Deltek a lot, I have over 300 custom fields and we have been bending its will to handle real estate and property flipping. I know it is going to be far better then Quickbooks and a spaghetti database of Google sheets(over 180 sheets) we have right now to handle the 800 to 1000 properties we flip a year. We are working with CCG and have only ran into a few speed bumps so far and all on the accounting side of things (Balance sheet accounting per project vs general ledger). The strong customizable workflows and notifications/emails will support our current system well and I wont have people screwing up the main inventory of properties as they wont be in a big “excel” sheet of data where they could mistype in a cell and they will now be dealing with one property at a time.

-Jake

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Depending on what type of support you provide, having some sort of KVM over IP might be helpful. Especially if you are hiring someone new and they come across an issue they don’t know how to handle after you leave.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/626947-the-r-a-t-box-my-macgyver-ed-remote-troubleshooting-solution?page=1

If having something as simple as a video client (facetime, skype etc) on your phone and the new support person’s phone so you can see what is going on if there is a major outage etc.

5 Spice ups
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I work very often remotely.

I got a small IPSec router at home, so i have access to the full network (and all vlans), than for remote working I got a win7 vm in hyper-v to which I RDP from my own desktop. and a notebook on the side which is a domain member.

If you wanna have full access to the network. to every ip and every device. get a IPSEC vpn.

2 Spice ups
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May I suggest a KVM over IP as well. This will give you the ability to do BIOS level things on critical servers as if you were there physically, like being able to start something in safe mode and so on. Being that far away and they want to keep you, I think a KVM over IP is a necessity.

1 Spice up
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I am in Central Florida and support one of our projects in Hawaii. 6 hour time difference is fun.